The Magazine

Little Soso

For Stalin, the child was father of the tyrant.

Mar 10, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 25 • By MICHAEL WEISS
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Young Stalin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Knopf, 496 pp., $30

There's a grim irony in the fact that Joseph Stalin first made a name for himself--even if it was only one of his many pseudonyms--as a poet. It was the poets, after all, who understood him best:

But wherever there's a snatch of talk

it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,

his words like measures of his weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,

the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses

he toys with the tributes of half-men.

It cost Osip Mandelstam his freedom and his sanity to compose these lines in 1934, the year of Sergei Kirov's murder, which furnished the paranoid rationale for the purging of Old Bolsheviks ("he rolls the executions on his tongue like berries") and the establishment of a one-man dictatorship in Russia.

"Red Tsar" is how Simon Sebag Montefiore described Stalin in his previous book exploring the Kremlin mountaineer's sanctum sanctorum of terrified toadies and sybaritic lieutenants. Having thus expertly dealt with the adult years, the historian now sets out to capture the totalitarian in bloom. Young Stalin is ambitiously introduced as a "pre-history of the USSR itself, a study of the subterranean worm and the silent chrysalis before it hatched the steel-winged butterfly."

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